Category: meta

Five years ago today, I started a blog.

1,944 posts later, here I am.

I don’t really know what to do to celebrate this event, other than to thank anyone who continues reading, and anyone who has read me in the past, and everyone who will read me in the future.

Sometimes I’ve got too much to say, and sometimes I can’t think of anything to say. All I really know is that I’m going to keep on saying things as long as I can, and I’m thankful to the internet for providing me a place to say them.

My daily visits have ranged from almost 500 a day, to around 175 per day in the last couple of months – likely due to my not having had much interesting to say lately. But I’m not doing this for fame. I’m writing for myself, and every single reader who finds something interesting here is a gift above and beyond.

The more successful blogs tend to have a focus on one topic; I don’t think I could ever limit myself like that. But there are several topics that tend to stand out more than the others; strip clubs and movies are the only ones I have tagged right now, but I intend to go back and tag the other topics soon, like politics, and atheism/religion. Exercise showed up a lot, until I split that off into its own blog at its own domain.

Aha! I thought of a project for celebrating my blogiversary! I’m going to re-post one post a day from the archive for the next 30 days, representing what I think are the best writing I’ve done, or the most popular posts, or uniquely showing what I do that no other blog does.

If you have any suggestions or favorite posts, feel free to leave a comment, or otherwise let me know.

Update: Turns out Blogger counts draft posts among the total. I currently have 63 draft, unpublished posts, so my total published posts, including this one, are 1,880. I regret the error. – BrianM 7:01 PM 11/02/2008

I finally succumbed to FriendFeed. What is it, you ask? Well, my sexy yet apparently-cave-dwelling reader, it’s a site that aggregates all the various social networking web apps into one spot. So instead of trying to track my friends’ Tweets, Flickr updates, YouTube uploads, blog posts, etc., etc… I just track it all on FriendFeed. Is this not nifty?

Yes. It is nifty.

I will find a way to incorporate it as a sidebar here on my blog. In fact, I’m thinking of updating the layout here a bit. We’ll see how that goes.

After much thought, I have added a little “Donate” button to my left-sidebar. It’s down there at the bottom, discreet, not too showy. See it?

It’s through PayPal, which not everyone likes, but who has become essentially the bank on the interwebs. And, truthfully, I’m not even 100% sure it works, since I’m unable to test it.

If I’ve made you laugh, or think, or angry, or otherwise entertained you, and you feel like showing some appreciation, click on the gold Donate button and send somethin’ my way. If there are any problems or questions about it, just drop me a line.

Thanks just for reading. Also, I love you all.

I’ve been averaging around 2400 hits per day, so when I my web stats program showed that I was ~2400 hits from 500,000 last night at midnight, I figured sometime today I should pass that magical and entirely arbitrary point.

I’m home and waiting for “The Office” to come on, so I manually ran my webalizer script early to see how close I was.

And as of 8:40 PM tonight, my site had recorded 502,527 hits since 25 August 2007.

Today’s not over and I’ve already received over 4,622 hits just today. That rocks in an entirely unimportant and yet deeply geek-y way.

There’s probably no way for me to tell when, exactly, the 500,000th hit came in so I can’t give away a prize or anything. But thanks to all y’all.

The statistic that means the most to me, personally, is the number of visits, which is more closely related to the number of actual people viewing my site, and, presumably, reading my words and looking at my pictures. My average visits per day is 483. Almost 500 people a day are paying attention to what I’ve written.

I love you all.

I came up with a cockamamie scheme to spam-proof my reader survey, but the implementation is taking me a bit to figure out. Don’t worry, I’ll have it up in no time.

Also, I’ll be launching my next site in the Lunar Obverse media empire soon. Seriously. Just remember that “soon” is a vague time frame.

I’m just 3 or 4 days from receiving my 500,000th hit since moving my server, calculated from my web stats page.

I’ll do a big shot of vodka when I cross that threshold. Or gin. Or dance a jig. One of those.

I’m probably posting my survey tonight. Unless I think of more questions to ask. Y’all are OK with answering a 50-page survey, right? Right?

OK, so I’ve finally got my web stats page working* and I noticed that I’m coming up on 500,000 hits since I moved my site to my own server back in August.

Since my daily average of hits for April is ~1800/day, I should cross the threshold of a half-million hits in about 17 days, or around the end of the month.

Yay, me!

Assuming my traffic remains the same, I’ll pick up my 1,000,000th hit in mid-January next year. Will I finally be popular then?

* Mostly – if you click and it redirects to http://Eggers.local/webalizer, try replacing “Eggers.local” with “bamoon.com” in the address line. Yeah, it’s a weird DNS thing I don’t know how to fix.

I swear I’ll get back to the stories soon. I promise. But one last post about my home network and my smaller domains.

I fixed my home network tonight.

My Mac mini was… ahem… asleep. Yes, when I transfered over my settings from the laptop (my main computer) to the Mac mini, it also transfered over my Energy Saver preferences, like going to sleep to save power after about 15 minutes. Ugh. Simple problem, simple fix.

Oh, snap. I didn’t try to reach my domains from a different network – just tried it from my laptop, already on my home network. This morning I can’t get to them at all. Can’t tell if my cable provider is blocking me (finally, after months and months of not blocking me), or if I messed something up.

I hate spending so much time fixing something, and then finding out it’s broken again. That sucks. But there’s a chance it’s not my fault.

Not that that makes me feel any better. But, y’know.

OK, my smaller domains are back up and running:

• lunarobverse.com, just a place-marker for now,
• The Lie Factory, my cynically-named political blog,
• Run, Moon!, my personal diet and exercise blog.

So… about seven hours to get it all back up from (almost) scratch.